If you have not been living in a cave these last few months, you probably heard that cryptocurrency trading is the new global trend. Kids left and right buy altcoins and get rich without working, sounds tempting right ?
Well today we will not advise you which altcoins you should buy, instead our article aims to inform you of the simplest ways to open crypto wallets in trustworthy exchanges.
Who are these crypto debit cards for ?
If you are crypto enthusiast and look to avoid using banks when withdrawing assets, because of high taxes or unfavourable government policies – crypto debit cards are for you.
And if you are someone who sends money abroad or wants to gamble online – trust us, these crypto debit cards are life savers.
Crypto credit and debit cards make your assets significantly more portable if you are cryptocurrency investor. Want to have dinner at a nice restaurant or have a coffee at Starbucks? As long as they accept Visa you can pay with cryptocurrencies and complete the transactions in only mere minutes.
Previously, it was almost impossible to use cryptocurrencies in stores as the transactions would take up to 30 minutes. But with Visa-based crypto payment cards, you do not have this problem at all.
How does a crypto card work?
Take not that one does not directly pay with Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other crypto assets. When using these cards, your digital assets are converted into the local fiat currency.
Using Crypto Debit Cards is simple and rewarding. When you receive cryptocurrency in your wallet, you can sell those for fiat money and top up your crypto card. By doing so, you are ready to make purchases from online stores, POS Terminals or just withdraw funds from your local ATM.
Platforms listed below also have cashback policies , as well as crypto rewards for using their crypto cards. Saying it simply, by using your cryptocurrency card, you receive bonuses in altcoins or fiat.
How and where to order Crypto Debit Card ?
There are many exchanges and wallets which offer crypto debit cards. Below we will give you our three recommendations, based on low fees, good customer service and trustworthiness.
Crypto.com Card
Fees & Limits
Issuance Fee • 0
ATM Fee • 0 (up to USD 200), 2.00% above that
Spend Fee • 0.00%
Monthly Fee • 0
Minimum Deposit • 0
General information
MCO Visa Card (Crypto.com Card) is the result of the rebranding of the Monaco Card. The rebranding transition was completed in September 2018 and the card is now shipping in, among other places, Singapore, USA and the countries in the European Union.
As far as fiat currencies, the card supports USD, LEV, GBP, HKD, EUR, JPY, SGD and AUD.
The MCO Visa Card (Crypto.com Card) is, as you might have expected, a Visa card, meaning that it is accepted essentially everywhere in the world.
Crypto.com Card Fees
There is no issuance fee. There is no monthly fee (0.00 USD). Actually, there is not even any commission on spending. This means that if you buy a nice sweater for USD 100, this will reduce your crypto assets with only USD 100.
There is no maximum or minimum deposit either. Wow, just wow.
The only fee we have been able to find (comparable to other cards) is the ATM withdrawal fee. There is no such fee for withdrawals up to USD 200. But thereafter, the fee is 2.00%.
There are six card types (starting from the least exclusive), where the deal you get is the best for the most exclusive. With “deal” we mean higher limit for free ATM-withdrawals and bigger crypto cash-backs (2.00% for the Obsidian Black, see below). See more on this under Different Card Benefits below. These are the card types:
Midnight Blue (no purchase/stake of CRO Tokens required);
Ruby Steel (purchase/stake of at least 5,000 CRO Tokens – to be held for no less than 6 months – required);
Jade Green/Royal Indigo (purchase of at least 50,000 CRO Tokens – to be held for no less than 6 months – required);
Icy White/Frosted Rose Gold (purchase of at least 500,000 CRO Tokens – to be held for no less than 6 months – required);
Obsidian Black (purchase of at least 5,000,000 CRO Tokens – to be held for no less than 6 months – required).
On the date of last updating this review (20 January 2021), 1 CRO-token was worth around USD 0.083. This means that the four levels mentioned above correspond to the following USD-amounts:
(i) USD 415;
(ii) USD 4,4150;
(iii) USD 41 500; and, finally,
(iv) USD 415,000.
Different CRO Card Benefits
The different card levels bring different benefits. The company behind the MCO Visa Card has produced a very helpful overview, showing the benefits from each and every one of the card types. It is available here:
MCO Visa Card (Crypto.com Card) Cashback Function
The card from Crypto.com also offers something very interesting: a cashback feature. What is a cashback feature? Well, it’s actually quite simple, every time you use the card, a percentage of what you pay with the card gets transferred back to you in the form of CRO-tokens. And the percentage is actually from 1-8%, depending upon how many CRO-tokens that you stake. Please be advised here that it is not necessary that you hold a certain amount of CRO-tokens, you need to stake them as well. The CRO-staking levels required for the different cashback-percentages are set out in the below table:
Create Crypto.Com Account and order card > HERE
Binance Card
Fees & Limits
Issuance Fee • 0
ATM Fee • 0.9%
Spend Fee • 0.00%
Monthly Fee • 0
Minimum Deposit • 0
Binance Wallet – General information
The card is formally issued by Contis Financial Services Ltd who is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority to issue e-money (Firm Reference Number: 900025) and is a member of Visa.
The card has been around since March 2020, but it was announced on 15 December 2020 that it will also start shipping to the European Economic Area, namely:
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Gibraltar, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.
For the avoidance of doubt, the Binance Card will only use the funds from your Binance Card wallet (the balance on your Binance account). The Binance Card cannot be topped up from other external platforms. Funds which are sent directly from 3rd party platforms will not be credited to your Binance Card, and might result in the loss of these funds.
The card also comes with transaction-push notifications. This means that each time you make a purchase with your Binance Card, you will receive a push notification on your Binance mobile app.
Supported Cryptos in Binance
The card has support for BNB (Binance Coin), BUSD (Binance USD), BTC (Bitcoin), ETH (Ethereum) and SXP (Swipe). Also, it supports the EUR fiat currency (the card in other continents support other fiat currencies as well of course).
Cryptocurrency Wallet Binance – Virtual Card Interface
The following picture shows how you can control the card or navigate it from your Binance account. The layout of all features seems very intuitive to us and easy to understand.
The following picture represents a card which has not yet been used (which is why there is no transaction history, no cashback etc.) and all assets on the card have been redacted from display.
Binance Debit Card Cashback
The card from Binance also offers something very interesting: a cashback feature. What is a cashback feature? Well, it’s actually quite simple, every time you use the card, a percentage of what you pay with the card gets transferred back to you in the form of BNB-tokens. And the percentage is actually from 0.1-8%, depending upon how many BNB-tokens you hold. The levels required for the different cashback-percentages are set out in the below table (updated on 23 April 2021):
8% is a very high cashback level, one of highest there is. Another card company with a cashback function (Wirex), only offers 1.50% in cashback. The aggregate amount of cashbacks that you have generated are also displayed on your Binance Card Interface (see the picture above).
Binance Card Fees
There are no monthly fees. There are no issuance fees. There are no minimum deposit limits. As long as you have a balance on the Binance-account that the card is connected to, you can use the card.
The most important fee of them all is the commission on spending. Binance Card has a low commission on spending, 0.90%. The 0.90% applies also to ATM-withdrawals. The only other fee you might need to think about is if you have lost the physical card and want Binance to reissue it. They will happily do that, but to a fee of EUR 25. But that’s it!
There is also a daily maximum spending limit: EUR 8,700 per day.
Transactions on digital wallets, digital banking services, crypto exchanges, stored value products, money remittance services, and certain other categories are however excluded from the BNB cashback program.
Binance Card Security
Binance Card also seems to take security very seriously, just like the Binance Exchange does. Any funds received by you are held in a segregated account so that in the unlikely event that Contis Financial Services Ltd (the formal issuer of the card) becomes insolvent, your funds will be protected against claims made by creditors.
Create Binance Account and order card > HERE
Trastra Card
Fees & Limits
Issuance Fee • 9$
ATM Fee • 2.25 $
Spend Fee • 0.00%
Monthly Fee • 2$
Minimum Deposit • 0
General information
At the moment, it is only available to people from the European Economic Area, so if you’re from the EEA (or not from the EEA but still interested), this review will be very exciting to you.
TRASTRA seems to focus a lot on simplicity. It is a VISA-card, meaning that you can use the card at any point of payment that accepts VISA. This is of course a great advantage, seeing that VISA is the most widely accepted card in the world (alongside MasterCard).
TRASTRA Fees
TRASTRA’s fees are very competitive. There are of course fees involved in using it, but these are not deterrent to using it at all.
There is a low monthly fee, only EUR 1.25 a month. There is an issuance fee set to EUR 9.00. This is slightly below the global industry average crypto debit card issuance fee which is arguably around USD 15.00.
Over then to ATM-fees. Balance inquiries will set you back EUR 0.35 and a PIN-change will cost you EUR 0.40. The actual withdrawal fees are EUR 2.25 if you withdraw EUR or withdraw from inside the EEA. On the other hand, if you withdraw another fiat currency than EUR or withdraw from somewhere outside the EEA, you will have to pay EUR 2.25 + 3% of the withdrawn amount. Fixed fees like this may become disadvantageous in countries where the normal ATM-machines only allow smaller amounts of withdrawals (EUR 20 for instance). In such scenarios, in order to withdraw a larger amount you need to withdraw several times, thus triggering the fixed fee each time. You can usually avoid this by just going to a local bank at the relevant place. Local banks normally permit higher withdrawals.
Furthermore, the most important fee of them all, is the commission on spending. TRASTRA doesn’t have a spending commission at all for online and offline purchases in EUR. This is a very competitive feature for this card and it is actually quite unusual. For non-EUR card purchases, there is a spending fee amounting to 3.00% of the transaction value. So, clearly a more beneficial offering when it comes to EUR-purchases.
There are no maximum or minimum deposit limits at all.
Cryptocurrency Wallet TRASTRA Security
TRASTRA also seems to take security very seriously. Among other things, the card is protected by VISA identity check, you can enable two factor authentication, there’s anti-fraud protection and device authorisation requirements. What else could you possibly need?
Create Trastra Account and order card > HERE
